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Pitch your innovative business idea!

LaunchLab’s mission is to facilitate valuable connections for startups and corporates, as well as other relevant business partners to help those startups be successful.

The Ideas Programme was the first programme that LaunchLab facilitated and is now in its 7th year! The programme helps new concepts and potential businesses validate their concepts with real market players and starts their journey towards the maturity required to acquire customers and obtain investment. The ideal “startup” for this programme is one that does not have a prototype, or if it does, it is not currently experiencing significant sales.

The Ideas Programme

March to June 2018

The Ideas Programme is intended primarily to be for very early-stage businesses looking to validate their concepts or improve their technology offering to their market. LaunchLab provides access to our client network who are actively looking for startups to partner with, which aids in the validation.

Impact in 2017:

4 Startups directly invested in by LaunchLab clients

10 Pilots with LaunchLab clients

24 Startups selected for our award winning incubation programme

R1.18m in prize money awarded across all of our programmes

LaunchLab is looking for startup business ideas in multiple industries, including but not limited to:

The Process

Between 15 March and 11 May we will be receiving 3 minute video pitches online where you can upload a file on our website, send is a link to a video or send it through wetransfer.

We will be holding info sessions at various partner campuses around South Africa to provide context to the opportunities with LaunchLab and our corporate partners.

Selection

After receiving hundreds of entries, we will shortlist 20-40 startups to run through a few weeks of a business development crash course. During this time we will determine if we have the resources and network to be able to add value to the startups and help them toward success.

After 2 weeks of this, we will select finalists to pitch to a panel of judges at the LaunchLab.

Pitching Platform

The finalists will be invited to our Ideas Pitching Platform, where they will get 4 minutes to pitch their business. Then our judges will have 4 minutes to ask questions of the entrepreneurs.

At the end of the evening, the LaunchLab Crew with our judges will select those startups that will join our community and programmes to build towards engaging with our corporate partners.